Web Content Management module availability

Hi,As far as i know, Alfresco is only a document content management so far.How soon are you going te get available a web content management ? I'm in the process to decide the architecture for an e-goverment portal/CMS in a ASP modality and I'm also interesting in the base platform Alfresco software platform is based in (we are java evangelists ….). But I'm also looking at other products like Plone, Joomla, Drupal and this question is very important to get the right decision.

We have recently aquired the vice president of engineering and several key developers from a well known Web Content Management company called Interwoven. These guys will now be focused solely on developing a new breed of WCM application on the Alfresco repository platform! :)

We expect the first preview of this software to be available in the summer this year.

Kevin Cochrane here, and as Kevin Roast noted, we are actively working on our web content roadmap now.

Here's the current thinking. This information will be posted to our wiki shortly. Questions / comments / requests of course highly desired:

Target:- Preview release mid-summer- 1.0 release by end of year

Ten areas of functional enhancements we are actively investigating:

1. Change set staging and in-context preview Ability to add, edit, or delete multiple files and folders in sandboxed workspace and test those changes in a virtualized view of the entire website. Ability to integrate approved change sets into the main website and deploy for public consumption.2. XML data capture and transformation Ability to access browser-based forms with configurable business logic to capture structured content and store as any arbitrary XML document. Ability to apply rules against capture XML to transform into any number of output format (multiple HTML page renditions, other XML formats, or PDF).

3. Document publishing and transformation Ability to publish documents from a collaboration space and promote PDF and HTML renditions to an internal or public-facing website. Ability to resync renditions upon document modification.

7. Site templating Ability to templatize a website, including default directory structure, page templates, content forms, editorial review processes, deployment rules, and more. Ability for web content managers to create new websites based on existing site templating to quickly clone and publish a new website with minimal development and configuration.

8. Site snapshoting and rollback Site-level archival for purposes of rollback and recovery.

9. Integrated deployment module Ability to deploy approved sites, pages, and content to one or multiple front-end webservers. Includes support for timed launch and expiration and ability to deploy both static, generated HTML or XML to a run-time JCR for dynamic content delivery.

In addition to the above, we are also looking to build a sampleOOTB website (an information-orient internet website) that canbe used OOTB or as a reference for people's own developmentefforts. This reference site will be packaged so that others caneasily contribute additional templates and components so thatother types of reference sites can be readily shared from Alfrescoimplementation to Alfresco implementation.

As noted, this is our preliminary targets that are under considerationright now. Our wiki will be updated in the next coming week to reflectthis information.

In my opinion, it's still one of the best WCM product today, even if it's becoming more and more phased out.

I see you are taking some good idea from Interwoven and i hope you will succeed in this challenge. Therefore, i hope you will not take the bad one ;)

RegardsTwinsen

Kevin Cochrane here, VP Engineering at Alfresco. I was the original guy behind TeamSite (employee #4) and just left Interwoven few months back - unhappy with the long-term direction of TeamSite. And yes, I hope to keep the good and improve in areas where improvements where needed. Stay tuned to our wiki, and if you'd like to discuss this in greater detail, please feel free to email me at kevinc@alfresco.com

Just few questions about WCM. Will it be a separate product (I saw someone mentioning version 1.0), or integrated into Alfresco? Also, what kind of licensing model do you plan for WCM? Same as Alfresco? With free community edition, Professional, Enterprise etc?

Just few questions about WCM. Will it be a separate product (I saw someone mentioning version 1.0), or integrated into Alfresco? Also, what kind of licensing model do you plan for WCM? Same as Alfresco? With free community edition, Professional, Enterprise etc?

WCM will be a module that will install atop the Alfresco platform. As a separate package it will have its own version # and release schedule. The entire WCM module will be open source and available in the community edition.

Just few questions about WCM. Will it be a separate product (I saw someone mentioning version 1.0), or integrated into Alfresco? Also, what kind of licensing model do you plan for WCM? Same as Alfresco? With free community edition, Professional, Enterprise etc?

WCM will be a module that will install atop the Alfresco platform. As a separate package it will have its own version # and release schedule. The entire WCM module will be open source and available in the community edition.

We've been able to sucessfully integrate Alfresco into several CMS and MVC packages. Using the PHP5 client library this not too big a task. You should take a look at http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/php/

I was curious of any revised estimate of availability of the functionality mentioned earlier in this post as far as features to be offered by the WCM. We are really excited to propose using something like this for a couple of our clients or roll our own on top of Alfresco if necessary. Just wondering where it might be at today before we start such an effort.